Somerstown Gallery Roundup
Machines, vitrines, illusions and fear
I rounded up two galleries near King’s Cross, close together by bike, which, while showing different work, were both very much bothered about the link between materials and the virtual worlds we live in. [Play Lime Bike unlocked jingle.]
Somers Gallery had a two-artist show. I was drawn to it by the relief sculptures of Jack Evans, because, as predicted last year, relief is in. Halfway between a flat image and a sculpture, relief is easily reproducible online, but for its fullness needs to be met in person (unlike some painting which looks better on screen).
At Somers Gallery, the reliefs resembled marble slabs impressively carved with images taken with an Iphone, such as a plastic cup with a tray of fast food. The ephemeral, flat images of ephemera are made permanent. Alas, the sculptural material was of a cheap and light kind, which undermined the tension between permanent and throwaway. I know stone carving is expensive and time-consuming, but if these relief sculptures only convey permanence when seen online, then the virtual maintains its ascendancy over us and we are all doomed.
The paintings by Dylan Doe showed hands twisted into each other and strange skeletal apparati. The concern seems again to be the relation between the body and the machine, but here with a crooked, Heath Robinson bent. I liked the merging of the labour of painting with pictures of hands, but I was not convinced that, within the loose and washy medium of oil paint, the ideas were pushed beyond the kooky or the nostalgic.
At Season Four Episode Six the handmade and the machine also came together. Archie Fooks-Smith places a minutely detailed set of drawings to build up a sense of the multidimensionality of being online. Graphite urls, tabs, emojis and icons are layered into a dense accumulation of time, both in terms of the artist’s manual labour and scary hours spent on the internet. Nestled in the vitrines are drug paraphernalia, electronics, sacred symbols and other allusive objects. The overall effect is of being plugged into the artist’s computer and having his house key inserted into your nose. Chuck in some demon masks and you’ve got yourself a real nightmare of virtual embodiment, intensely detailed but elegantly spare at the same time.
Without conceding to nostalgia, the show conveys the lawless atmosphere of the early internet, a report back from its deepest, most Joseph Conrad corners. Something of this approach is preserved in the exhibition’s nonchalant refusal to put the artist’s ideas into a coherent text. Instead, it provides a phone number that you can call for more information. This, of course, does a good job of representing the covert path that the rest of the work treads. Perhaps folks should give it a ring and decide whether they would like to go along.
‘Latent Relics’ featuring Dylan Doe and Jack Evans runs at Somers Gallery 8 May to 7 June 2025.
Archie Fooks-Smith, ‘URL List Leshy: A Conclusive Ode to the Nightmare Carnival’ runs at Season Four Episode Six 22 May to 5 July.